I have no final conclusions to offer about
ghosts, spirits, reincarnation, or any other manifestation suggestive of
survival after death. As in most areas of consciousness exploration, a
final opinion is of less value than an appreciation of and tolerance for
ambiguity; as well as a willingness to carefully explore the evidence and
claims, cultures and contexts. For the great by-product of the search for
the life beyond is an extraordinary enrichment of our understanding of
the life within.

In the first edition of this book, as I
was writing about this topic, I found it difficult in my excitement to
keep from floating off into romantic speculation about the great beyond.
The feeling was something like looking at a mountain peak in the distance,
being stimulated by the excitement of its beauty and majesty, just by knowing
it is there. What The Roots of Consciousness is about (I had to
remind myself) is the continuum of existence between birth and death. It
is something like the space between sleeping and waking. Moving from one
to the other is really a gradual process. Each step takes us to the next.
Living and dying, breathing, sleeping, dreaming, being, communicating --
our consciousness touches all of these worlds. Yet, in the spirit of the
early Wittgenstein (the twentieth century's great positivist philosopher),
there is truly nothing meaningful I can say about existence beyond the
veil of mortal life (if such there be). What I shall expound upon is the
consciousness that we the living develop in relationship to the mystery
of death. For we are all touched by its silence.

Ancient Egypt

In Egypt, life after death was thought
to be a natural continuation of life on earth, and one senses another inner
reality merging with their technology.

The shamanic practices of earlier tribes
became incorporated into the organized Egyptian national priesthood. However,
the Egyptian religion is no longer practiced, and the ancient language
is largely lost. The evidence remaining regarding the different cults and
their practices and theologies is still shrouded in impenetrable mystery.
Yet, these people devoted themselves so intensely to their cult of the
dead, it is easy to imagine that many of their seer-priests actually did
see the spirits of their departed.

The following testament comes from the
pyramid of Unas, a 5th Dynasty king:

The heavens drop water, the stars
throb, the archers go round about, the bones of Akeru tremble, and those
who are in bondage to them take to flight when they see Unas rise up as
a soul, in the form of the god who liveth upon his fathers and who maketh
food of his mothers. Unas is the lord of wisdom and his mother knoweth
not his name ...The kas of Unas are behind him, the sole of his foot is
beneath his feet, his gods are over him, his uraei are upon his brow, the
serpent guides of Unas are in front of him and the spirit of the flame
looketh upon his soul. The powers of Unas protect him: Unas is a bull in
heaven, he directeth his steps where he will, he liveth upon the form which
each god taketh upon himself, and he eateth the flesh of those who come
to fill their bellies with the magical charms in the Lake of Fire.

As one might infer from the above passage,
the Egyptian version of existence in the afterworld is somewhat obscure.
In certain instances it seems that the Egyptians actually believed in a
physical existence after death for which the departed required worldly
riches and sustenance. Other descriptions are embodied in the realm of
mythology so that the nature of the afterlife is deeply symbolized in the
godforms themselves.

The Egyptian concept of spiritual resurrection
after death has a mythological basis in the story of Osiris -- the lord
of creation who was also a king of Egypt.

Osiris

At the height of his reign, Osiris is murdered
by his jealous enemy Set. His body is enclosed in a chest that is placed
at the mouth of the Nile, but eventually recovered by Osiris' wife, Isis.
Set however, finds it once more and dismembers it into fourteen pieces
he scatters throughout the land.

Isis searches for the pieces of Osiris'
body and finds all of them except the phallus. At this point, Horus, the
sun, the hawk god, appears on the scene. As the god of the sun, he always
existed. In fact the hawk is probably the first living thing worshipped
by the Egyptians, yet he is conceived by Isis from the dismembered body
of Osiris lacking the progenitive organ! The appearance of Horus represents
the resurrection of Osiris. Filled with his father's spirit, he defeats
Set in battle.

The battle between Horus and Set is re-enacted
each day. You can watch this epic drama as it unfolds in the sky by getting
up several hours before dawn and silently observing the sunrise.

The ancient Egyptians believed that as
the hawk arose from the dismembered body of Osiris, so would their awareness
survive the bodily death. However they also seemed to believe that proper
funeral rites were necessary to attaining afterlife in heaven. It seems
we are dealing with mixed popular superstitions with higher philosophy
and occult practice. In many ways the Egyptians seem to describe the afterlife
as being quite physical and sensory -- but perhaps this is a description
of how real it was for them. This physical imagery is, perhaps, a poetical
metaphor for the images the ancient seers had of the afterlife.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Buddhism, which originated in India, reached
a height of consciousness exploration in Tibet. All states of existence
for the Tibetan Buddhists other than pure Nirvana are reflections of the
limited illusion of self-consciousness. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
is a major document within this tradition; it describes the passage of
consciousness from death to rebirth. Existence is divided into six bardos,
three of which are experienced from birth to death and three of which occur
from death to rebirth. Yet, Buddhist philosophy teaches that birth and
death are not phenomena that occur only once in a human life; they are
part of an uninterrupted process. Every instant something within us dies
and something is reborn. The different bardos represent the different aspects
of this process in our own lives. All of these states are in flux.

chikhai bardo: The experience of
the primary clear light and the secondary clear light at the moment of
death.

chonyd bardo: The state of psychic
consciousness. Experiencing lights, sounds and rays. Seeing the peaceful
deities and then the wrathful deities.

sidpa bardo: Visions of the world
into which one's karma leads one to be born. Visions of males and females
in sexual union. Feelings of attachment and repulsion. Choosing and entering
the womb.

bsam-gtan bardo: The dream state.

skye-gnas bardo: The everyday waking
consciousness of being born into the human world.

These bardo states refer to the mental
processes of the soul during the periods of life and rebirth. Outside of
one's own consciousness there still remains another reality to be explored.
Entrance to this reality is attained by recognizing at any point that the
images and apparitions of the bardo state are merely the projections of
one's own consciousness.

With every thought of fear or
terror or awe

for all apparitional appearances set aside

May I recognize whatever visions appear
as

reflections of mine own consciousness

May I not fear the bands of peaceful and
wrathful deities, mine own thought-forms.

In the sidpa bardo, before rebirth, there
occurs a judgment of the good and bad deeds of the soul of the dead.

If thou neither prayest nor knowest how
to meditate upon the Great Symbol nor upon any tutelary deity, the Good
Genius, who was born simultaneously with thee, will come now and count
out thy good deeds with white pebbles, and the Evil Genius, who was born
simultaneously with thee, will come and count out thy evil deeds with black
pebbles. Thereupon, thou wilt be greatly frightened, awed, and terrified,
and wilt tremble; and thou wilt, attempt to tell lies, saying "I have not
committed any evil deed."

Then the Lord of Death will say, "I will
consult the Mirror of Karma."

So saying, he will look in the Mirror,
wherein every good and evil act is vividly reflected. Lying will be of
no avail.

This situation very closely parallels the
weighing of the heart described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead
as well as the judgments appearing in later Greek and Christian traditions.
It seems to reflect an archetypal reality that permeates the deep consciousness
of many cultures, perhaps the ultimate symbol of meaning and order in the
universe. Modern research is still attempting to investigate this reality,
though perhaps with less sophistication than the Tibetans who claim to
have developed ways to communicate with the departed spirit after death
in order to aid in its passing through the bardo states.

Interestingly enough, the Tibetan Book
of the Dead, has been used as a "constant companion" by Carl Jung whose
psychological theories tend to unite scientific logic with mysticism. It
was also used by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner as the
basis for understanding the nature of the psychedelic experience.

The bardo states are accessible to everyone.
Yet there is a subtle process involved in attaining all higher states of
consciousness -- a kind of trying not to try -- which is embodied most
clearly in the life of Tibet's great saint, Milarepa, who never uttered
a word that did not come out in song and poetry. This delicacy of living
is manifest also in Chinese Taoism.

Every culture has a set of beliefs regarding
the afterlife. Some of the most interesting are those developed by scientists
themselves.

The Visions of Gustav Theodore Fechner

The great psychophysicist Gustav Theodore
Fechher -- one of the foremost instigators of modern, scientific psychology
-- wrote extensive speculations in a work called the Book of Life After
Death which G. Stanley Hall describes thus:

How now do the dead live on? First
and chiefly in us. Fechner takes his leading concept from the mystic way
in which Christ lives in his followers, who are members of his body and
branches of his vine. To this larger life of his in the Church, his earthly
career is only a grain of mustard seed. Gloriously his soul has gone marching
on. Just so the dead press in upon us, yearning to add their strength to
ours, for thus they not merely live, but grow. New impulsions and sudden
insights in us are inspirations from them. Not only do the great and good
dead influence and pervade us all the time, but we are exposed also to
the bad. Many of them are always bad, and so if our will is weak and our
personality unorganized, they may dominate us. Their visitation is insistent.
They do not crave incarnation in the flesh, like Plato's spirits, but in
our moral life, that therein they may be made perfect. We all have in us
sparks from the lives of Luther, Goethe, Napoleon, etc., who think and
act in us "no longer restrained by the limitations of the body, but poured
forth upon the world which in their lifetime they moulded, gladdened, swayed,
and by their personality they now supply us with influences which we never
discern as coming from them." Each great dead soul extends itself into
man and unites them in a spiritual organism. Thus, the dead converse wit
each other in us. They also fight the good and bad in each other in us,
causing strife in our souls....

There is, however, a higher soul in which
we and all things live, move, and have our being, and in which and only
in which spirits are real. We are, in fact, what we have become. The brain
is a kind of seed which decays that the soul may live. The individual soul
may mount on the collective souls of the dead as a sparrow is carried up
on an eagle's back to heights it never could attain, but, when there, can
fly off and even a little higher. At death the soul seems to drop below
a threshold and the spark of consciousness might be conceived to go out
but for the fact that the soul is not projected into an empty world but
into one where it incessantly meets varying resistances that keep personality
above the point of submergence or any other extinction without appeal to
the conservation of energy. Just as attention moves about from point to
point within the body, so after death the soul moves around the world.

When the phenomena of spiritualism became
popular in mid-nineteenth century Europe and America, Fechner sat with
zeal at a number of seances. He was one of the few men of his age who,
while not detecting trickery, had the depth of wisdom with which to incorporate
but also transcend the sensationalism and trivia of the popular spiritualist
impulse.

Spiritualism

Spiritualism as a social movement apparently
began in the small New York town of Hydesville in March of 1848, where
several months earlier, the Fox family had taken over an old farmhouse
about which the previous tenants had complained of strange noises. The
Foxes themselves soon noticed unusual rapping sounds that occurred in the
night frightening the two younger daughters, Margaret and Kate, who then
insisted on sleeping with their parents. On the fateful evening of March
31, the youngest daughter Kate playfully challenged the raps to repeat
the snapping of her fingers. Her challenge was answered. Within hours many
of the neighbors were brought over to the house to witness the uncanny
demonstration.

By asking the sounds be repeated twice
for a negative answer and only once for an affirmative, the people assembled
were soon able to carry on a `(!logue with the rapping -- which had revealed
itself to apparently be coming from a spirit source. One of the neighbors,
Deusler, suggested naming the letters of the alphabet and having the spirit
rap when they reached certain letters in order to spell out letters and
sentences. In this way the spirit revealed himself to have been a travelling
peddler who was murdered in the house by a previous owner and buried in
the cellar. Digging commenced, however a high water level prevented any
immediate discoveries.

Meanwhile, hundreds of neighbors continued
visiting the Fox house, day and night, listening to the spirit's rapping.
They also formed an investigation committee to take testimony. The case
was even studied by the Honorable Robert Dale Owen, a member of the U.
S. Congress, and a founder of the Smithsonian Institute. In the summer
of 1848, more digging unearthed human teeth, some fragments of bone and
some human hair.

While the testimony is ambiguous, some
neighbors reported that the raps continued in the Fox house even when family
members were not present. However, it became apparent that this form of
mediumship centered on the Fox sisters, though it soon spread to many other
people as well.

Fifty-six years later in 1904, the gradual
disintegration of one of the cellar walls of the Fox house exposed to view
an entire human skeleton.

Other mediums, using the alphabet method,
also claimed to be in contact with the spirits of the deceased. Their messages
were generally not reliable however. It seems that for every apparently
genuine medium there were many deluded or phony imitators.

During November 1849, the Spiritualists
held their first public meeting in the largest hall available in Rochester,
N.Y. Three different citizen's committees in Rochester were invited to
investigate the Fox sisters. All three made favorable reports indicating
that the sounds heard were not produced by ventriloquism or machinery.
The public was outraged at these reports. A riot resulted and the girls
had to be smuggled away from an angry crowd.

The Fox sisters made a career of their
mediumship. They toured the country under the auspices of the showman,
P. T. Barnum. While receiving the sympathetic attention of Horace Greeley,
the editor of the New York Tribune, who later became a candidate for the
U.S. presidency, the sisters remained a center of controversy. In 1871,
Charles F. Livermore, a prominent New York banker, sent Kate Fox to England
in gratitude for the consolation he had received through her powers.104
At that time she was examined by the physicist Sir William Crookes, who
later received the Nobel prize for his discovery of thalium:

For several months I have enjoyed
the almost unlimited opportunity of testing the various phenomena occurring
in the presence of this lady, and I especially examined the phenomena of
these sounds. With mediums, generally, it is necessary to sit for a formal
seance before anything is heard; but in the case of Miss Fox it seems only
necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to
be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard
several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree --
on a sheet of glass -- on a stretched iron wire -- on a stretched membrane
-- a tambourine -- on the roof of a cab -- and on the floor of a theatre.
Moreover, actual contact is not always necessary; I have had these sounds
proceeding from the floor, walls, etc., when the medium's hands and feet
were held when she was standing on a chair when she was suspended in a
swing from the ceiling -- when she was enclosed in a wire cage -- and when
she had fallen fainting on a sofa. I have heard them on a glass hermonicon
-- I have felt them on my own shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard
them on a sheet of paper, held between the fingers by a piece of thread
passed through one corner. With a full knowledge of the numerous theories
which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I
have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been
no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences
not produced by trickery or mechanical means.

The main argument used by skeptics to discredit
the Fox sisters was that they created the rapping sounds themselves by
cracking the bones in their toes and knuckles. This hypothesis, however,
does not seem sufficient to explain the different kinds of sounds that
appeared, their loudness, the fact that they often occurred in arpeggios
and cadenzas, and the fact that they seemed to emanate from different places.

Nevertheless, in 1888, Margaret Fox made
a public statement denouncing the spiritualists, claiming that she had
made the noises by cracking her toes. Kate, who was with her at the time
remained silent, as if in agreement. The following year, however, Margaret
recanted, saying she had fallen under the influence of people who were
inimical to spiritualism and who had offered her money. Both sisters were
alcoholics at this time. At no time in their careers were they actually
detected in a fraudulent act.

Crookes also recorded an experience of
direct writing with Ms. Fox:

A luminous hand came down from
the upper part of the room, and after hovering near me for a few seconds,
took the pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw
the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, gradually fading into
darkness.

The Spiritism of Allan Kardec

Allan Kardec

From the ranks of the spiritualists investigations
were also conducted, although along somewhat different lines than the experimental
work of the scientists. The former attempted to describe the world according
to the teachings of the spirits themselves. This theorization of spiritualism
was mainly due to L. H. D. Rivail (1803-1869) a doctor of medicine who
became celebrated under the pseudonym Allan Kardec.

Kardec's theories were simple enough: After
death the soul becomes a spirit and seeks reincarnation, which, as Pythagoras
taught, is the destiny of all human souls; spirits know the past, present,
and future; sometimes they can materialize and act on matter. We should
let ourselves be guided by good spirits, Kardec maintained, and refuse
to listen to bad spirits.

Kardec wrote many books which achieved
enormous popularity in his own lifetime. His works also spread to Brazil,
where he still has a huge following, and where postage stamps were recently
issued in his honor. His intellectual energy certainly deserves admiration.
However, he built his theory on the untenable hypothesis that mediums,
embodying a so-called spirit, are never mistaken, unless their utterances
are prompted by evil spirits. This notion does not of course, take into
account the possi-bilities of suggestion, multiple personality, or unconscious
influences which were quickly developed as alternative hypotheses to outright
fraud by skeptical scientific investigators such as Michael Faraday.

Founding of the Society for Psychical
Research

Sir William F. Barrett, a professor of
physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, had been conducting
experiments in the 1880s testing the notion of thought-transference. Barrett
conceived of the idea of forming an organization of spiritualists, scientists,
and scholars who would join forces in a dispassionate investigation of
psychical phenomena. F.W.H. Myers, Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgewick attended
a conference in London that Barrett convened, and the Society for Psychical
Research (SPR) was created with Sidgewick, who had a reputation as an impartial
scholar, accepting the first presidency.

The Society set up six working committees,
each with a specific domain for exploration:

1. An examination of the nature
and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another,
apart from any generally recognized mode of perception.

2. The study of hypnotism, and the forms
of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain; clairvoyance
and other allied phenomena.

3. A critical revision of Reichenbach's
researches with certain organizations called "sensitive," and an inquiry
whether such organizations possess any power of perception beyond a highly
exalted sensibility of the recognized sensory organs.

4. A careful investigation of any reports,
resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death,
or otherwise, or regarding disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted.

5. An inquiry into the various physical
phenomena commonly called spiritualistic; with an attempt to discover their
causes and general laws.

6. The collection and collation of existing
materials bearing on the history of these subjects.

The great American psychologist, William James,
met Gurney in England in 1882 and immediately they struck up a close friendship.
Later James also became a close friend of Myers. In 1884, Barrett toured
the United States and succeeded in arousing the interest of American scholars
in forming a similar society, which was established in 1885, and in which
William James took an active role. The American Society for Psychical Research
constituted the first organized efford for experimental psychological research
in the United States. For a period of many years, before the ascendency
of the German experimental approach of Wilhelm Wundt, psychology in the
United States was equated with the efforts of psychical research.

The evidence for life beyond death comes
from several sources. There are cases of hauntings and apparitions, mediumistic
communications and automatic writings, possessions, incidences of child
prodigies, and ostensible reincarnation data. A large amount of this evidence
was gathered during the heyday of spiritualism in the nineteenth century,
and is recorded in The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Death by F. W. H. Myers. Modern research places a much greater emphasis
on laboratory studies and is predicated upon a much different approach
to the evidence.

Many levels of the human personality clearly
exist and are still generally unexplored and untapped. Yet a number of
cases can be cited where even such explanations do not account for all
the observed phenomena.

Human Personality and Its Survival of
Bodily Death

F. W. H. Myers

Many other phenomena were explored by the
SPR during its early years. The major attempt to synthesize the great mass
of data which had been gathered was undertaken by Frederick Myers and published
in 1903 after his death in a work called The Human Personality and Its
Survival of Bodily Death. Myers was widely read in all the fields of
knowledge of his day. His work is a testimony to his wide-reaching and
poetical mind and his deep interest in the work of the psychoanalysts.
He was, in fact, the first writer to introduce the works of Freud to the
British public, in 1893. His book is still regarded by many as the most
important single work in the history of psychical research. Even those
who do not accept his hypothesis of the survival of the soul are indebted
to his explorations of the unconscious and subliminal regions of the personality.

Myers maintained that the human personality
was composed of two active coherent streams of thoughts and feelings. Those
lying above the ordinary threshold of consciousness were considered supraliminal
while those that remain submerged beneath consciousness are subliminal.
The evidence for the existence of this subliminal self derives from such
phenomena as automatic writing, multiple personalities, dreams, and hypnosis.
These phenomena all expose deeper layers of the personality that normally
remain unseen. In many cases the deeper layers seem autonomous and independent
of the supraliminal self. For example, certain memories are uncovered through
hypnosis and dreams which are normally inaccessible to the conscious mind.
Or in the case of certain people of genius, complete works of art will
emerge from dreams. Automatic writers can sometimes maintain two conversations
at once, each unaware of the other one.

Myers examined all of these phenomena carefully
and felt that they were part of a continuum ranging from unusual personality
manifestations to telepathic communications, travelling clairvoyance, possession
by spirits, and actual survival of the subliminal layers of personality
after the death of the body. He felt each experience in this spectrum was
integrally related to the other states of being. This insight was his deepest
theoretical penetration into the roots of consciousness.

Myers began his analysis by looking at
the ways in which the personality was known to disintegrate. Insistent
ideas, obsessing thoughts and forgotten terrors lead up to hysterical neuroses
in which the subliminal mind takes over certain body functions from the
supraliminal. Gradually these maladies merge with cases of multiple personalities.
He noted the subliminal personalities often represented an improvement
over the normal conscious self, and suggested that:

As the hysteric stands in relation
to ordinary men, so do we ordinary men stand in relation to a not impossible
ideal of sanity and integration.

Thus from the disintegrated personality which
reveals some of the negative aspects of the subliminal self, Myers moved
naturally to look at people of genius, within whom, according to Myers,
"some rivulet is drawn into supraliminal life from the undercurrent stream."
He discussed mathematical prodigies and musicians whose works spring fully
formed into their consciousness. Of particular interest was Robert Louis
Stevenson who deliberately used his dream life in order to experiment with
different dramatizations of his stories. Not mentioned by Myers, but certainly
applicable here, would be the incredible inventions which entered the minds
of Thomas Edison (himself a spiritualist) and Nicola Tesla, whose genius
led him to develop alternating current and many modern electrical appliances.
Myers did cite the poet Wordsworth as being particularly sensitive to this
aspect of the creative process, which he described in "The Prelude, or
Growth of a Poet's Mind:"

That awful power rose from the mind's abyss,Like an unfathomed vapor that enwraps,At once, some lonely traveller. I was
lost;Halted without an effort to break through;But to my conscious soul I now can say"I recognize thy glory;" in such strengthOf usurpation, when the light of senseGoes out, but with a flash that has revealedThe invisible world, doth greatness make
abode.

In addition to people of genius, Myers
included saintly men and women whose lives have absorbed "strength and
grace from an accessible and inexhaustible source."

From neurosis, genius and sainthood Myers
moved to a state of being all individuals experience -- sleep, which he
describes as the abeyance of the supraliminal life and the liberation of
the subliminal. The powers of visualization, for instance, are heightened
during the hypnogogic state as one passes into sleep and in the hypnopompic
state as the dream lingers into waking consciousness. Myers also discerned
the heightened powers of memory and reason that occur in some dreams, and
further cases of clairvoyance and telepathy in dreams. And he cited cases
of what seem to be "psychical invasions" in dreams by spirits of both living
and departed persons. He concluded by suggesting that sleep is every person's
gate to the "spiritual world."

Hypnosis was described as the experimental
exploration of the sleep phase of human personality. The unusual phenomena
that occur in hypnosis were ascribed to the power of the subliminal self
that is appealed to in such states. The subliminal self appears to enjoy
greater control over the body than the supraliminal. Myers also pointed
out the relationship of hypnosis to other phenomena such as faith healing,
the miraculous cures at Lourdes, and the use of magical charms. He emphasized
the experimental work done in telepathic hypnotic induction at a distance
as well as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition observed in the hypnotized
subject.

From hypnosis Myers moved to visual and
auditory hallucinations psychical researchers have labelled sensory automatisms.
When hearing a sound or seeing a color or form carries with it an association
of images from another sense, this process is within the brain and is termed
entencephalic. The stages leading from such percepts to ordinary vision
include entoptic impressions due to stimuli from the optic nerve or eye
and after-images which are formed in the retina. Stages leading further
inward from entencephalic vision include memory images, dreams, images
of the imagination and hallucinations. Many hallucinations cited were shown
to contain information that was later verified. Other hallucinations clearly
seemed to hold positive benefits for the personality and were not associated
in any way with disease. Crystal gazing is a possible positive use of the
mind's ability to hallucinate. Other hallucinations include the phantasms
of the living and the dead which we have already discussed.

From sensory automatisms Myers moved to
motor automatisms -- including automatic writing and speaking in tongues.
Most of these phenomena can be attributed to the subliminal mind within
the automatist's own brain. Other cases lead one to suspect telepathy and
possible communication from deceased spirits. There are cases of automatic
writing, for example, in which the handwriting of a deceased person is
alleged. A further development of this would be possession by another personality
other than the subliminal self. However, it is very difficult to distinguish
cases of spirit possession from cases of multiple personality. The personal
identity of such a spirit must be clearly distinguished by its memory and
its character. Yet this is a phenomena common to all religious traditions
that has also been observed at least once, Myers felt, by SPR researchers.
He noted that such possession did not appear to have an injurious effect
on the medium.

It is on the basis of this continuum of
experiences that Myers asserted the subliminal self is able to operate
free from the brain in ways that modify both space and time as they appear
to the supraliminal self. Just as the subliminal self is able to control
physiological functions of the brain and body, as best exemplified through
hypnotic experiments, so is it able to exert force on other physical objects
accounting for levitations, materializations, spirit rapping, etc.

The Watseka Wonder

The case of the Watseka Wonder is listed
by Myers as an incidence of multiple personality strongly suggesting the
spiritualist hypothesis. It was originally published in the Religio-Philosophical
Journal in 1879 and later in pamphlet form with the title "The Watseka
Wonder," by E. W. Stevens. The editor of the journal, highly regarded as
a skillful and honest investigator by Myers, spoke highly of Dr. Stevens
and claimed to have taken great pains to "obtain full corroboration of
the astounding facts" from competent witnesses. The case briefly is the
alleged possession of thirteen year old Lurancy Vennum by the spirit of
Mary Roff, a neighbor's daughter who had died at the age of eighteen when
Lurancy was a child of about fifteen months.

Myers quotes Dr. Stevens, with his abridgements
in square brackets:

[Mary Lurancy Vennum, the "Watseka
Wonder," was born April 16th, 1864, in Milford township, about seven miles
from Watseka, Illinois. The family moved to Iowa in July 1864 (when Lurancy
was about three months old), and returned to within eight miles from Watseka
in October 1865 (three months after the death of Mary Roff). Lurancy was
then about a year and a half old. After two other moves in the neighbourhood,
the family moved into Watseka on April 1st, 1871], locating about forty
rods from the residence of A. B. Roff. They remained at this place during
the summer. The only acquaintance ever had between the two families during
the season was simply one brief call of Mrs. Roff, for a few minutes, on
Mrs. Vennum, which call was never returned, and a formal speaking acquaintance
between the two gentlemen. Since 1871 the Vennum family have lived entirely
away from the vicinity of Mr. Roff's, and never nearer than now, on extreme
opposite limits of the city.

"Rancy," as she is familiarly called, had
never been sick, save a light run of measles in 1873.

[On July 11th, 1877, she had a sort of
fit, and was unconscious for five hours. Next day the fit recurred, but
while lying as if dead she described her sensations to her family, declaring
that she could see heaven and the angels, and a little brother and sister
and others who had died. The fits or trances, occasionally passing into
ecstasy, when she claimed to be in heaven, occurred several times a day
up to the end of January 1878; she was generally believed to be insane,
and most friends of the family urged that she should be sent to an insane
asylum.

At this stage Mr. and Mrs. Asa B. Roff,
whose daughter, Mary Roff, as we shall see, had had periods of insanity,
persuaded Mr. Vennum to allow him to bring Dr. E. W. Stevens of Janesville,
Wisconsin, to investigate the case.]

On the afternoon of January 31st, 1878,
the two gentlemen repaired to Mr. Vennum's residence, a little out of the
city. Dr. Stevens, an entire stranger to the family, was introduced by
Mr. Roff at four o'clock P.M.; no other persons present but the family.
The girl sat near the stove, in a common chair, her elbows on her knees,
her hands under her chin, feet curled up on the chair, eyes staring, looking
every like an "ol` hag." She refuses to be touched, even to shake hands,
and was reticent and sullen with all save the doctor, with whom she entered
freely into conversation giving her reasons for doing so; she said he was
a spiritual doctor, and would understand her.

[She described herself first as an old
woman named Katrina Hogan, and then as a young man named Willie Canning,
and after some insane conversation had another fit, which Dr. Stevens relieved
by hypnotizing her. She then became calm, and said that she had been controlled
by evil spirits. Dr. Stevens suggested that she should try to have a better
control, and encouraged her to try and find one. She then mentioned the
names of several deceased persons, saying there was one who wanted to come,
named Mary Roff.

Mr. Roff being present, said: "That is
my daughter; Mary Roff is my girl. Why, she has been in heaven twelve years.
Yes, let her come, we'll be glad to have her come." Mr. Roff assured Lurancy
that Mary was good and intelligent, and would help her all she could; stating
further that Mary used to be subject to conditions like herself. Lurancy,
after due deliberation and counsel with spirits, said that Mary would take
the place of the former wild and unreasonable influence. Mr. Roff said
to her, "Have your mother bring you to my house, and Mary will be likely
to come along, and a mutual benefit may be derived from our former experience
with Mary."

[On the following morning, Friday, February
1st, Mr. Vennum called at the office of Mr. Roff and informed him that
the girl claimed to be Mary Roff, and wanted to go home. He said, "She
seems like a child real homesick, wanting to see her pa and ma and her
brothers."

Mary Roff was born in Indiana in October
1846. Mary had had fits frequently from the age of six months, which gradually
increased in violence. She had also had periods of despondency, in one
of which, in July 1864, she cut her arm with a knife until she fainted.
Five days of raving mania followed, after which she recognized no one,
and seemed to lose all her natural senses, but when blindfolded could read
and do everything as if she saw. After a few days she returned to her normal
condition, but the fits became still worse, and she died in one of them
in July 1865. Her mysterious illness had made her notorious in the neighbourhood
during her life-time, and her putting his own aballeged clairvoyant powers
are said to have been carefully investigated "by all the prominent citizens
of Watseka, including newspaper editors and clergymen.

It was in February 1878 that her supposed
"control" of Lurancy began. The girl then became mild, docile, polite,
and timid, knowing none of the family, but constantly pleading to go home,"
and "only found contentment in going back to heaven, as she said, for short
visits."]

About a week after she took control of
the body, Mrs. A. B. Roff and her daughter, Mrs. Minerva Alter, Mary's
sister, hearing of the remarkable change, went to see the girl. As they
came in sight, far down the street, Mary, looking out of the window, exclaimed
exultantly, "There comes my ma and sister Nervie!" -- the name by which
Mary used to call Mrs. Alter in girlhood. As they came into the house she
caught them around their necks, wept and cried for joy, and seemed so happy
to meet them. From this time on she seemed more homesick than before. At
times she seemed almost frantic to go home.

On the 11th day of February, 1878, they
sent the girl to Mr. Roff's, where she met her "pa and ma," and each member
of the family, with the most gratifying expressions of love and affection,
by words and embraces. On being asked how long she would stay, she said,
"The angels will let me stay till some time in May;"...

The girl now in her new home seemed perfectly
happy and content, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when
in her original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and
calling by name those who were friends and neighbours of the family from
1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds
of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period
of her sojourn at Mr. Roff's she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize
any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or neighbours, yet Mr. and Mrs.
Vennum and their children visited her and Mr. Roff's people, she being
introduced to them as to any strangers. After frequent visits, and hearing
them often and favourably spoken of, she learned to love them as acquaintances,
and visited them with Mrs. Roff three times.

One day she met an old friend and neighbour
of Mr. Roff's, who was a widow when Mary was a girl at home. Some years
since the lady married a Mr. Wagoner, with whom she yet lives. But when
she met Mrs. Wagoner she clasped her around the neck and said, "0 Mary
Lord, you look so very natural, and have changed the least of any one I
have seen since I came back." Mrs. Lord was in some way related to the
Vennum family, and lived close by them, but Mary could only call her by
the name by which she knew her fifteen years ago, and could not seem to
realize that she was married. Mrs. Lord lived just across the street from
Mr. Roff's for several years, prior and up to within a few months of Mary's
death; both being members of the same Methodist church, they were very
intimate.

One evening, in the latter part of March,
Mr. Roff was sitting in the room waiting for tea, and reading the paper,
Mary being out in the yard. He asked Mrs. Roff if she could find a certain
velvet head-dress that Mary used to wear the last year before she died.
If so, to lay it on the stand and say nothing about it, to see if Mary
would recognize it. Mrs. Roff readily found and laid it on the stand. The
girl soon came in, and immediately exclaimed as she approached the stand,
"Oh, there is my head-dress I wore when my hair was short!" She then asked,
"Ma, where is my box of letters? Have you got them yet?" Mrs. Roff replied,
"Yes, Mary, I have some of them." She at once got the box with many letters
in it. As Mary began to examine them she said, "Oh, ma, here is a collar
I tatted! Ma, why did you not show to me my letters and things before?"
The collar had been preserved among the relics of the lamented child as
one of the beautiful things her fingers had wrought before Lurancy was
born, and so Mary continually recognized every little thing and remembered
every little incident of her girl-hood....

In conversation with the writer about her
former life, she spoke of cutting her arm as hereinbefore stated, and asked
if he ever saw where she did it. On receiving a negative answer, she proceeded
to slip up her sleeve as if to exhibit the scar, but suddenly arrested
the movement, as if by a sudden thought, and quickly said, "Oh, this is
not the arm; that one is in the ground," and proceeded to tell where it
was buried, and how she saw it done, and who stood around, how they felt,
&c., but she did not feel bad. I heard her tell Mr. Roff and the friends
present, how she wrote to him a message some years ago through the hand
of a medium, giving name, time, and place. Also of rapping and of spelling
out a message by another medium, giving time, name, place, &c., &c.
which the parents admitted to be all true....

During her stay at Mr. Roff's her physical
condition continually improved, being under the care and treatment of her
supposed parents and the advice and help of her physician. She was ever
obedient to the government and rules of the family, like a careful and
wise child, always keeping in the company of some of the family, unless
to go in to the nearest neighbours across the street. She was often invited
and went with Mrs. Roff to visit the first families of the city, who soon
became satisfied that the girl was not crazy, but a fine, well-mannered
child.

As the time drew near for the restoration
of Lurancy to her parents and home, Mary would sometimes seem to recede
into the memory and manner of Lurancy for a little time, yet not enough
to lose her identity or permit the manifestation of Lurancy's mind, but
enough to show she was impressing her presence upon her own body.

[On May 19th, in the presence of Henry
Vennum, Lurancy's brother, Mary left control for a time, and "Lurancy took
full possession of her own bod recognizing Henry as her brother. The change
of control occurred again when Mrs. Vennum came to see her the same day.]

On the morning of May 21st Mr. Roff writes
as follows: --

"Mary is to leave the body of Rancy to-day,
about eleven o'clock, so she says. She is bidding neighbours and friends
good-bye. Rancy to return home all right to-day. Mary came from her room
upstairs, where she was sleeping with Lottie, at ten o'clock last night,
lay down by us, hugged and kissed us, and cried because she must bid us
good-bye, telling us to give all her pictures, marbles, and cards, and
twenty-five cents Mrs. Vennum had given her to Rancy, and had us promise
to visit Rancy often."

[Mary arranged that her sister, Mrs. Alter,
should come to the house to say good-bye to her, and that when Lurancy
came at eleven o'clock she should take her to Mr. Roff's office, and he
would go to Mr. Vennum's with her. There was some alternation of the control
on the way, but the final return of the normal Lurancy Vennum took place
before they reached Mr. Roff's office, and on arriving at her own home
she recognized all the members of her own family as such, and was perfectly
well and happy in her own surroundings. A few days later, on meeting Dr.
Stevens, under whose care she had been at Mr. Roff's house, she had to
be introduced to him as an entire stranger, and treated him as such. The
next day she came to him spontaneously, saying Mary Roff had told her to
come and meet him, and had made her feel he had been a very kind friend
to her, and she gave him a long message purporting to be from Mary.

In 1890, Richard Hodgson visited Watseka and
interviewed many of the principle witnesses of this case. Their testimony
was in agreement with Dr. Stevens' presentation. However, Hodgson was unable
to get in touch with Lurancy Vennum herself. He draws the following conclusions
to the case:

I have no doubt that the incidents
occurred substantially as described in the narrative by Dr. Stevens, and
in my view the only other inter-pretation of the case -- besides the spiritistic
-- that seems at all plausible is that which has been put forward as the
alternative to the spiritistic theory to account for the trance-communications
of Mrs. Piper and similar cases, viz., secondary personality with supernormal
powers. It would be difficult to disprove this hypothesis in the case of
the Watseka Wonder, owing to the comparative meagreness of the record and
the probable abundance of "suggestion" in the environment, and any conclusion
that we may reach would probably be determined largely by our convictions
concerning other cases. My personal opinion is that the "Watseka Wonder"
case belongs in the main manifestations to the spiritistic category.

Apparitions and Hauntings

Working as honorary secretary of the SPR
and active on the literary committee, Edmund Gurney soon discovered that
the largest single class of occurrences reported were what came to be labelled
crisis apparitions. These occur when the figure or the voice of a living
person who is experiencing a crisis--such as an accident or a death--is
seen or heard.

Probably you or your friends have had such
experiences, that are strangely confirmed by the news, later on, of the
actual crisis.

Within one year of its organization, the
SPR had collected over 400 reports of such cases and in 1886, Gurney published
a 1,300 page document entitled Phantasms of the Living in which
702 different apparition cases were analyzed. All of the evidence was obtained
first-hand from the percipients and was generally backed by corroboratory
testimony. Witnesses were also interviewed by SPR members who appraised
the value of all testimony.

Gurney described several categories of
apparition cases. These are cases of spontaneous telepathy, which occur
when the sender is undergoing some shock or strong emotion. For example
a lady lying in bed may feel a pain in her mouth at the exact moment when
her husband is accidently struck in the jaw. Then come cases where the
percipient's experience is not an exact reproduction of the agent's experience,
but is only founded upon it, the receiver building a detailed picture from
his or her own mind. There are many cases of this type where a person about
to arrive at a location is actually seen there by someone not expecting
him before his arrival. It is very unlikely that the agent will have in
his mind the image of himself as others see him. Finally Gurney refers
to the cases in which the agent may be dead or dying while the phantom
appears in quite normal behavior and clothing.

Gurney felt that these cases could be explained
as hallucinations induced in the mind of the percipient by means of a telepathic
message from the agent. What was harder to explain were collective apparitions
in which several people independently perceive the identical phantom. There
were also reciprocal cases whereby a person imagining himself to be at
a distant scene is actually seen at that location by others.

Phantasms of the Living was soon
criticized by the eminent American philosopher C. S. Pierce and several
others on the grounds that the cases reported did not meet sufficient conditions
to be acceptable as evidence. Most of these critical individuals simply
did not read the entire book. Their criticisms focused on the weakest cases
and overlooked certain cases that were very well documented in all regards.
However, Gurney felt that if only a few single cases were strongly evidential,
the conclusions for crisis telepathy were inescapable. He stressed the
extent to which the skeptical arguments would have to be pushed in order
to dismiss the entire bundle of data:

Not only have we to assume such an extent
of forgetfulness and inaccuracy, about simple and striking facts of the
immediate past, as is totally unexampled in any other range of experience.
Not only have we to assume that distressing or exciting news about another
person produces a havoc in the memory that has never been noted in connection
with stress or excitement in any other form. We must leave this merely
general ground, and make suppositions as detailed as the evidence itself.
We must suppose that some people have a way of dating their letters in
indifference to the calendar, or making entries in their diaries on the
wrong page and never discovering the error; and that whole families have
been struck by the collective hallucination that one of their members had
made a particular remark, the substance of which had never entered that
members head; and that it is a recognized custom to write mournful letters
about bereavements which have never occurred; and that when a wife interrupts
her husband's slumber with words of distress or alarm, it is only for fun,
or a sudden morbid craving for underserved sympathy; and that when people
assert that they were in sound health, in good spirits, and wide-awake,
at a particular time which they had occasion to note, it is a safe conclusion
that they were having a nightmare, or were the prostrate victims of nervous
hypochondria. Every one of these improbabilities is perhaps, in itself
a possibility; but as the narratives drive us from one desperate expedient
to another, when time after time we are compelled to own that deliberate
falsification is less unlikely than the assumptions we are making, and
then again when we submit the theory of deliberate falsification to the
cumulative test, and see what is involved in the supposition that hundreds
of persons of established character, known to us for the most part and
unknown to one another, have simultaneously formed a plot to deceive us
-- there comes a point where reason rebels.

Phantasms of the Living did not
deal with apparitions of persons who had been dead for more than twelve
hours. However,according to an article published by Mrs. Eleanor Sidgewick,
the society had some 370 cases in its files "which believers of ghosts
would be apt to attribute to agency of deceased human beings." While the
majority of these cases might be dismissed as hallucinations, there were
four types of cases that did seem to support the notion that some aspect
of personality survives death.

1. Cases in which the apparition conveyed
to the percipient accurate information that was previously unknown to him.

2. Cases in which the "ghost" seemed to
be pursuing some well-defined objective. The spirit of Hamlet's father
who makes Hamlet swear to seek revenge for his murder is a famous literary
example of this.

3. Cases in which the phantom bears a strong
resemblance to a deceased person who is unknown to the percipient at the
time of the manifestation. A case of this sort, incidentally, recently
made headlines in the Berkeley Gazette, as the phantom was observed
in the Faculty Club of the University of California

4. Cases in which two or more people had
independently seen similar apparitions: Into this category falls your typical
haunting ghost or apparitions associated with a particular location. Often
such phantoms are seen by individuals who are ignorant of previous sightings.
These phantoms rarely seem to speak or take notice of humans, although
voices and noises may be associated with them, and they are generally not
seen for more than a minute before they vanish.

Apparitions and personal experiences of
seeing the dead still occur and there is a great need for people to feel
comfortable discussing them openly. The following article with a front-page
headline appeared in the Berkeley Gazette on March 19, 1974. The
reason for the headline was not that this experience with a phantom was
unusual; but rather that it was uncommon -- and commendable -- for a person
of professional standing in the community to speak so directly about his
experiences.

A haunting at the faculty clubBy Richard RamellaI-G Staff Writer

Dr. Noriyuki Tokuda did not believe
in ghosts until he encountered some recently in his room at the Faculty
Club on the University of California campus here.

The visiting Japanese scholar, described
by a local friend as "an intelligent, rational man," had no pat explanation
to give for what he saw the evening of March 9.

In a half-somnolent state, he recalls,
he saw a "very gentlemanly" looking Caucasian man, sitting on a chair and
peering at him. As Dr. Tokuda shook out of his sleep, he next saw "something
like two heads, floating, flying high across the room."

A moment later the apparitions had vanished.

LATER, WHEN Dr. Tokuda told club personnel
about his unsettling experience, they told him the room in which he was
staying had been occupied for 36 years by a University of California professor
who died two years and a week BEfore Tokuda checked into the room.

Officials described the professor. To Tokuda,
there seemed to he a resemblance.

Tokuda says he, his wife and children lived
in Berkeley from 1967 to 1969. "I love Berkeley very much." Given this
feeling, he discounts any possibility of his vision being engendered by
being in a strange place.

HE RECALLS what happened:

"On March 9 I flew to Berkeley from Boston.
Prof. Chalmers Johnson of the political science department took me from
the airport to the faculty club. He advised me to take a short nap because
of the three hour gap in time. I was tired, so I took a nap."

"At 7 p.m., while sleeping, l had a funny
impression -- felt some kind of psychological pressure. I was almost awake.
I saw something in my dream. I felt some old gentleman -- Western, white
-- sitting on the chair by the bed, watching quietly. It was quite strange.

"I opened my eyes then and saw a funny
picture -- two heads with a body passing out of my sight and disappearing."

WITH THAT Dr. Tokuda opened his eyes very
wide and saw nothing strange. "1 was surprised. Maybe it was a dream or
a fantasy. I went out to dinner, came back and slept. 1 wasn't visited
again."

After a trip to Stanford, Dr. Tokuda returned
to the faculty club. By then he had told his strange story to his friends,
Prof. Chalmers Johnson and his wife Sheila. They insured that he did not
get Room 19 during the second stay.

When Tokuda checked out of the club yesterday,
an official there told him his former room had for 36 years been the home
of a solitary professor who died (not in the room) in March 1971.

"YOU'RE KIDDING me. Don't scare me," Tokuda
responded.

"I cannot believe in ghosts," says Tokuda,
a political scientist specializing in modern China.

But still, he smiled and said: "I think
perhaps Prof. X still likes to live there and doesn't want to leave."

Tokuda, 42, is senior researcher and chairman
of East Asian studies at the Institute of Developing Countries in Tokyo.
He teaches at Keio University in Japan's capital.

"We have lots of ghost stories in Japan,
too," the scholar says, "but I have never been so serious about it except
when I was a child."

Professor Tokuda was quite clear about the
fact he was not in a normal state of consciousness during his experience.
Yet one senses from his statements and the fact that he was motivated to
mention the incident publicly that whatever he perceived was much more
real to him than the hypnopompic imagery which typically precedes full
awakening. The fact that the apparition seemed to resemble the deceased
former resident is also interesting. Tokuda's apparition, however, is not
typical in many respects. Most of the apparition sightings reported to
psychical researchers are, in fact, much more vivid. Culling over hundreds
of case studies, G. N. M. Tyrell provides us with a picture of the "perfect
apparition." If the "perfect apparition" were standing next to a normal
individual, we would find points of resemblance:

(1) Both figures would stand out
in space and be equally solid.

(2) We could walk around the apparition
and view it from any perspective as vividly as the normal individual.

(3) The two figures would appear the same
in any sort of lighting conditions, whether good or bad.

(4) On approaching the apparition, one
could hear it breathing and making other normal noises, such as the rustling
of its clothes.

(5) The apparition would behave as if aware
of our presence. It might even touch us, in which case it would feel like
an ordinary human touch.

(6) The apparition could be seen reflected
in a mirror just as a real person.

(7) The apparition might speak and even
answer a question, but we would not be able to engage it in any long conversation.

(8) If we closed our eyes, the apparition
would disappear from view just as the ordinary person would.

(9) The apparition would appear clothed
and with other normal accessories such as a stick or a package, perhaps
even accompanied by a dog.

(10) Many times, when close to, or touched
by, the apparition, we would feel an unusual sensation of coldness.

(11) If we tried to grab hold of the apparition,
our hand would go through it without encountering any resistance. The apparition
may disappear when cornered in this fashion.

(12) The apparition would generally not
remain more than half an hour. It might vanish through the walls or floor.
Or it might simply open the door and walk out.

(13) Apparitions differ in the extent to
which they are able to actually effect physical objects, open doors, cast
a shadow, be photographed. The "perfect apparition" cannot really cause
any objectively measurable effects, although it may cause the subjective
appearance of doing so.

When several individuals, independently or
simultaneously, observe the same phantom under conditions that make deception
or suggestion unlikely, the event can no longer be interpreted as a totally
subjective experience. Some kind of parapsychological explanation is probably
required.

Collective cases of this sort account for
approximately eight percent of the total number of reported apparitions.
Naturally, many times only one person is present to see the phantom. Collective
cases are more common when several potential observers are present. In
a group situation, if one person sees an apparition, there is about a forty
percent likelihood that others will share his perception.

However, even collective cases of apparitions
of a person known to be dead do not provide certain evidence for survival.
The research on out-of-body experiences suggests that it may be possible
for one to cause one's own apparition to appear to others. Likewise, there
is evidence an individual, through concentration, can create the apparitional
appearance of a different person as well. Such experiments were documented
in 1822 by H. M. Wesermann, who was the Government Assessor and Chief Inspector
of Roads at Dusseldorf. The account of the appearance is recorded by one
of the percipients, a Lieutenant S. He says Herr n had come to spend the
night at his lodgings.

After supper and when we had undressed,
I was sitting on my bed and Herr n was standing by the door of the next
room on the point also of going to bed. This about half-past ten. We were
speaking partly about indifferent subjects and partly about the events
of the French campaign. Suddenly the door out of the kitchen opened without
a sound, and a lady entered, very pale, taller than Herr n, about five
foot four inches in height, strong and broad in figure, dressed in white,
but with a large black kerchief which reached down to the waist. She entered
with bare head, greeted me with the hand three times in a complimentary
fashion, turned around to the left toward Herr n, and waved her hand to
him three times; after which the figure quietly, and again without creaking
the door, went out. We followed at once in order to discover whether there
were any deception, but found nothing.

Even though the woman had been dead for five
years, Wesermann claimed he was the agent of her appearance. Furthermore,
it appears as if he had expected Herr n to be asleep alone in his bedroom
at the time instead of in the anteroom with Lieutenant S. Thus the observation
of the phantom by two awake individuals went beyond even the intentions
of the agent. By appearing in the anteroom, the phantom seemed to show
a will independent of the agent, Wesermann; it was perhaps a product of
the percipient's mind as well.

Wesermann's experiments were conducted
at a time when many researchers, including the French government commission,
were reporting unusual effects with Mesmerism. Wesermann himself acknowledged
that the successful production of such a phantom was, indeed, a rare event.

The point of such evidence is that the
human mind seems capable of generating apparitional appearances identical
to those often attributed to "departed spirits." However, in nearly all
apparitions, there is no living individual attempting to create the appearance.
It is unlikely that most apparitions were consciously created although
they may have been unconscious human productions.

Furthermore, even if an apparition results
from efforts by a once-living person, the apparition itself is not yet
evidence of a fully conscious disembodied spirit. Such phenomena may well
be mere images or thought-forms hanging around in the psychic space. Very
rarely do they show the characteristics of a well-developed personality,
even though they exhibit some independent consciousness. The apparition
evidence suggests we are continually swimming in a sea of thoughts and
images that exist independently of our own minds and that occasionally
intrude dramatically into our conscious awareness.

Near Death Experiences

Some interesting data relating apparitions
to survival appears in a survey of physicians' and nurses' observations
of dying patients. The 640 respondents to the survey, conducted by Karlis
Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research, had witnessed over
35,000 incidents of human death.

Karlis Osis

Of these, only about ten percent of the
patients were conscious in their last hours. These dying individuals often
experienced states of exultation or hallucination that could not be attributAd
to the nature of their illness, or to drug usage. While many patients had
visions of spiritual worlds opening up to them in accordance with their
particular religious beliefs, most of the hallucinations were of individuals
already dead. Half of the percipients stated the apparitions were coming
to help them "enter the other world." The education, age or sex of the
patients seemed to have nothing to do with the manifestation of such apparitions.
However the apparitions seemed most likely when the dying patient was in
a state of physiological and psychological peace and equilibrium. Oddly
enough a number of these apparitions were of individuals whose death was
unknown to the dying patient.

Dr. Raymond Moody, is a psychiatrist whose
classic book, Life After Life, published in 1976, was a major impetus
for a new wave of research on the phenomenon of near-death experience.
A founding member of the International Association for Near-Death Studies,
he is a professor of psychology at West Georgia College. He is also author
of Reflections on Life After Life and The Light Beyond.

Dr. Raymond Moody

In an InnerWork interview he summarizes
his years of investigation into near-death experience:

When patients have a cardiac arrest
-- they have no heartbeat, no detectible respiration -- very often their
physicians will say something such as, "Oh my God, he's dead, we've lost
him." The patients tell us that from their perspective they feel more alive
than ever. They say they float up out of their bodies, and they watch the
resuscitation going on from a point of view immediately below the ceiling
of the operating room. From this perspective they can see exactly what
is going on down below. They can understand the remarks and the thoughts
of the medical personnel who are around. It does not seem to make any sense
to them.

After a while they realize that although
they can see clearly and understand perfectly what is going on, no one
seems to be able to see or to hear them. So they undergo an experience
in which they realize that this is something to do with what we call death,
and at this point they experience what we might characterize as a turning
inward of the sense of identity.

One woman described this to me by saying,
"In this experience, at this point, you are not the wife of your husband,
you are not the mother of your children, you are not the child of your
parents. You are totally and completely you."

And at this point, at this moment of isolation
and realizing that this is what we call death, then very unusual, transcendental
experiences begin to unfold. I call them transcendental partly because
the patients say that these later steps of the near-death experience are
absolutely ineffable. Try as they may, they can not find any words to describe
the amazing feelings and experiences.

They say they become aware of what is described
as a tunnel, a passageway, a portal, and they go into this tunnel, and
when they come out, they come out into a very brilliant, warm, loving and
accepting light. People at this point describe just amazing feelings of
peace and comfort.

In this light they say that relatives or
friends of theirs who have already died seem to be there to help them through
this transition.

Another thing they will often tell us is
that at this point they are met by some religious figure. Christians say
Christ, Jews say God or an angel. This being, in effect, asks them a question.
Communication does not take place through words as you and I are now using,
but rather in the form of an immediate awareness: "What have you done with
your life? How have you learned to love?"

At this point, they say, they undergo a
detailed review of everything they have done in their lives. This is displayed
around them in the form of a full-color, three-dimensional panorama, and
it involves every detail of their life, they say, from the point of their
birth right up to the point of this close call with death.

The people who go through this say that
clock time is not a factor in these experiences. Interestingly enough,
patients often report that they review the events of their lives from a
third-person perspective, displaced out to the side or above. They can
also empathetically relate to the people with whom they have interacted.

They take the perspective of the person
that they have been unkind to. Accordingly, if they see an action where
they have been loving to someone, they can feel the warmth and good feelings
that have resulted. The patients who go through this tell us that no one
asks them about their financial well-being or how much power they have
had. Rather they were faced with the question of how they had learned to
love, and whether they had put this love into practice in their lives.

It certainly does not give us scientific
evidence in a rigorous sense, or proof, that we live after we die. But
I do not mind saying that after talking with over a thousand people who
have had these experiences, it has given me great confidence that there
is a life after death. As a matter of fact, I must confess to you in all
honesty, I have absoutely no doubt, on the basis of what my patients have
told me, that they did get a glimpse of the beyond.

It gives them a great sense of peace. Never
again do they fear death -- not that any of them would want to die in a
painful or unpleasant way, or that they would actively seek this out. As
a matter of fact, they all say that life is a great blessing and a wonderful
opportunity to learn, and that they do not want to die anytime soon. But
what they mean is that when death comes in its natural course of events,
they are not going to be afraid. They do not fear it in the least anymore
as being a cessation of consciousness.

We see this again and again -- no more
fear of death, renewed commitment to loving others, living in the present
and not worrying about the future and a great sense of contentment.

Mediumship

The classic line of argumentation for human
survival beyond death comes from is based upon cases of spiritualistic
mediumship -- an area fraught with fraud and chicanery. Another problem
with this type of mediumship was that the information coming spontaneously
from the medium might have already been stored in the unconscious memory.
What was needed to counter this objection was a medium who could consistently
produce accurate information on demand and without advance notice.

Mrs. Piper

Leonora E. Piper

Perhaps the best claimant to successful
mediumship was Mrs. Leonora E. Piper of Boston, Massachusetts. Her mediumship
began spontaneously in 1884, on the occasion of going into a trance during
the seance of another medium. At first her controlling spirits rather pretentiously
claimed to be Bach and Longfellow. Then appeared a self-styled French doctor
who gave the name of Phenuit and spoke in a gruff male voice full of Frenchisms,
Negro patois, and vulgar Yankee slang, nevertheless offering successful
diagnoses and prescriptions. Often the deceased relatives of the sitters
would speak through Mrs. Piper at her seances.

In 1886 William James, the great American
psychologist, anonymously attended one of her seances. He was sufficiently
impressed with the information that she revealed to him he sent some 25
other people, using pseudonyms, to her. Fifteen of these people reported
back to James that they had received from her names and facts it was improbable
she should know. In 1886, James issued a report to the SPR:

My own conviction is not evidence,
but it seems fitting to record it. I am persuaded of the medium's honesty,
and of the genuineness of her trance; and although at first disposed to
think that the "hits" she made were either lucky coincidences, or the result
of knowledge on her part of who the sitter was and of his or her family
affairs, I now believe her to be in the possession of a power as yet unexplained.

Despite his interest in Mrs. Piper, William
James gave up the inquiry at this point. Having convinced himself of her
validity, he chose to give his other work higher priority at that time.
The following year, however, Richard Hodgson, who had gained a reputation
as a skeptical researcher for his debunking of Madame Blavatsky, arrived
in Boston to head the American branch of the SPR He was astounded when
Mrs. Piper was able to offer many details about his family in Australia.
To check on her honesty, he even had her and her family shadowed for some
weeks by detectives. James and Hodgson decided it would be wise to test
Mrs. Piper in another environment, where she would have neither friends
nor accomplices to aid her. Accordingly she was invited to England by the
SPR organization there and set off in November of 1889.

The results with Mrs. Piper in England
were mixed. On a good day she was able to produce a mass of detailed information
about the sitters which generally left them dumbfounded. On a bad day,
her control, Phenuit, would behave in a most obnoxious manner, keeping
up a constant babble of false assertions and inane conversation, blatantly
fishing for information, and generally provoking the sitters. On no occasions
was it concluded that Phenuit was anything more than a secondary personality
of Mrs. Piper's.

During one seance Mrs. Piper revealed to
Sir Oliver Lodge a great deal of information regarding an uncle of his
who had been dead for twenty years. Lodge sent an agent to inquire in the
neighborhood where the uncle had lived. In three days he was unable to
unearth as much information as Mrs. Piper had provided. All of her remarks
were eventually verified by surviving relatives.

In 1890 Mrs. Piper returned to the United
States where she worked very closely with Richard Hodgson who spent the
next fifteen years investigating her mediumship.

Richard Hodgson

Psychiatrist Nandor Fodor gives us a picture
of Hodgson's research with Mrs. Piper:

His first report on the Piper
phenomena was published in 1892....In it no definite conclusions are announced.
Yet, at this time Hodgson had obtained conclusive evidence. But it was
of a private character and as he did not include the incident in question
in his report, he did not consider it fair to point out its import. As
told by Hereward Carrington in The Story of Psychic Science, Hodgson
when still a young man in Australia had fallen in love with a girl and
wished to marry her. Her parents objected on religious grounds. Hodgson
left for England and never married. One day, in a sitting with Mrs. Piper,
the girl suddenly communicated, informing Dr. Hodgson that she had died
shortly before. This incident, the truth of which was verified, made a
deep impression on his mind.

At first Hodgson felt that Mrs. Piper's
knowledge came to her telepathically. However, during a sitting in March
of 1892 a new controlling spirit came who identified himself as a George
Pellew, a prominent young man who had been killed a few weeks earlier and
who was casually known to Hodgson. Five years previously he had had one
anonymous sitting with Mr Piper. Pellew eventually replaced Phenuit as
the main control and as the intermediary between the sitters and the spirits
of their deceased friends. This particular control was very realistic and
seemed to Hodgson to be more than a mere secondary personality. He showed
an intimate knowledge of the affairs of the actual George Pellew, by recognizing
and commenting on objects that had belonged to him. Out of 150 sitters
who had been introduced to him he recognized exactly those thirty people
with whom the living Pellew had been acquainted. He even modified the topics
and style of conversation with each of these friends, and showed a remarkable
knowledge of their concerns. Very rarely did the Pellew personality slip
up.

Mrs. Piper had never once in her career as
a medium been detected in a dishonest action. Frank Podmore, the severest
critic in the SPR, became convinced of the genuineness of her telepathic
phenomena and, based on the Pellew material, the skeptical Richard Hodgson
was inclined toward a spiritualistic position.

To credit spiritualism, he based his arguments
for this position largely on the fact that a good amount of verified evidence
Pellew produced was unknown to anyone in the room at that time, and therefore
could not have been picked up telepathically by any of the sitters.

In 1897, Hodgson published a report on
Mrs. Piper in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research:

At the present time I cannot profess
to have any doubt that the chief communicators to whom I have referred
in the foregoing pages are veritably the personages that they claim to
be, and that they have survived the change that we call death, and that
they have directly communicated with us whom we call living, through Mrs.
Piper's entranced organism.

Mrs. Sidgewick argued against this position,
emphasizing the occasions that the personality of the control did seem
to degenerate.

Eventually several other spirits seemed
to take control over Mrs. Piper's mediumship including that of the departed
Reverend Stainton Moses.

In the presence of William James, America's
foremost psychologist, the "Hodgson control" was able to describe incidents
that Hodgson and James had intimately experienced together in life and
were unknown to other individuals. The personality was quite clear and
distinct. At other times this was not the case and the "spirit" seemed
like an obvious personation from Mrs. Piper's mind. In analyzing this data,
James suggested several factors were at play:

Extraneous "wills to communicate"
may contribute to the results as well as a "will to personate," and the
two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, though capable of helping
each other out. The will to communicate, in our present instance, would
be, on a prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson's surviving spirit;
and a natural way of representing the process would be to suppose the spirit
to have found that by pressing, so to speak, against "the light," it can
make fragmentary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say mix with the
rubbish of the trance-talk on this side. The two wills might thus strike
up a sort of partnership and reinforce each other. It might even be that
the "will to personate" would be comparatively inert unless it were aroused
to activity by the other will. We might imagine the relationship to be
analogous to that of two physical bodies, from neither of which, when alone,
mechanical, electrical or thermal activity can proceed. But, if the other
body be present, and show a difference of `potential, action starts up
and goes on apace.

I myself feel as if an external will to
communicate were probably there -- that is, I find myself doubting, in
consequence of my whole acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that
Mrs. Piper's dream-life, even if equipped with telepathic powers, accounts
for all the results found. But if asked whether the will to communicate
be Hodgson's, or be some mere spirit counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain
and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion
for fifty or a hundred years.

While James affirmed his belief in the reality
of the Hodgson spirit, based on his sense of dramatic probabilities, he
acknowledged the case was not a good one because Hodgson had known Mrs.
Piper so well in life. There was no way of proving any of the evidential
material did not simply come from her unconscious mind.

Cross-Correspondences

One of the more significant cases of mediumistic
communication concerns the many messages received by Sir Oliver Lodge from
his deceased son Raymond. An eminent physicist, Lodge pioneered in the
development of radio technology, which actually was as much his brainchild
as it was Marconi's, although he did not pursue its commercial development
to the same extent as his Italian colleague. Lodge (an SPR founder) was
already satisfied with the evidence for survival which had been gathered
by Myers and others before his son's death during a mortar attack on September
14, 1915.

Sir Oliver Lodge

Actually, the story of Raymond's "spirit
communications" begins a few weeks before his death, on August 8, when
a message allegedly came from the spirit of Myers through Mrs. Piper in
America. Hodgson's "spirit" claimed to be in control of the medium at the
time he delivered a message for Lodge which he claims to have received
from Myers. The enigmatic message stated:

Now Lodge, while we are not here
as of old, i.e. not quite, we are here enough to take and give messages.
Myers says you take the part of the poet and he will act as Faunus. Yes.
Myers. Protect. He will understand. What have you to say, Lodge? Good work.
Ask Verrall, she will also understand.

In order to interpret this message, Lodge
wrote to Mrs. Verrall -- a medium, psychic researcher, and wife of a deceased
Cambridge classical scholar -- asking her to interpret the message. She
replied at once referring to Horace (Carm. II. xvii. 27- 30), saying the
reference was to an account of the poet's narrow escape from death, from
a falling tree, Faunus, the guardian of poets, lightened the blow and saved
him.

On September 25, Raymond's mother, Mrs.
Lodge, attended a sitting with a reputable medium, Mrs. Osborne Leonard.
The visit was anonymous, and there was no intention of contacting Raymond;
the purpose being, rather, to accompany a grieving friend whose two sons
had also been killed in the war. In fact, it seemed as if the spirits of
those sons did communicate through Mrs. Leonard. However on that occasion,
a message also came through purporting to be from Raymond:

R: Tell father I have met some
friends of his.

ML: Can you give any name?

R: Yes. Myers.

Two days later, Sir Oliver himself attended
anonymously a sitting with Mrs. Leonard. The voice speaking through Mrs.
Leonard was her childlike "spirit control," Feda, who described Raymond's
condition, saying he was being taught by an old friend, M., and others.
Feda also made an allusion to the Faunus message:

...Feda sees something which is
only symbolic; she sees a cross falling back on you; very dark, falling
on you; dark and heavy looking; and as it falls it gets twisted round and
the other side seems all light, and the light is shining all over you....The
cross looked dark and then it suddenly twisted around and became a beautiful
light....Your son is the cross of light.

This message seemed to be perceived symbolically
as a thoughtform. One might complain the allusion was too vague to be evidential;
although it cannot be denied it is remarkably consistent with the original
Faunus message. In many respects this is typical of the complex series
of over 3,000 cross-correspondence messages to develop between a number
of mediums over the next several decades. Taken as a whole, they seem to
weave a pattern indicative of a unifying intelligence.

That afternoon, after seeing Mrs. Leonard,
Lady Lodge visited another medium, separately and strictly anonymously.
The following is a transcript of Mrs. Lodge's sitting, with Sir Oliver's
own annotations in brackets:

Was he not associated with chemistry?
If ng$, someone associated with him was, because I see all the things in
a chemical laboratory. That chemistry thing takes me away from him to a
man in the flesh [0. J. L., presumably as my laboratory has been rather
specially chemical of late]; and connected with him, a man, a writer of
poetry, on our side, closely connected with spiritualism. He was very clever
he too passed away out of England.

[This is clearly meant for Myers, who died
in Rome.]

He has communicated several times. This
gentleman who wrote poetry -- I see the letter M--he is helping your son
to communicate. If your son didn't know the man he knew of him.

[Yes, he could hardly have known him, as
he was only about twelve at the time of Myers' death.]

At the back of the gentleman beginning
with M, and who wrote poetry, is a whole group of people. [The SPR group,
doubtless.] They are very interested. And don't be surprised if you get
messages from them even if you don't know them.

At this sitting the "spirit control" also
made particular reference to a photograph of Raymond with a group of other
men in which you could see his walking stick. This puzzled Lady Lodge as
they knew of no such photograph. However several months later they received
a letter from the mother of one of Raymond's fellow officers with an offer
to send a copy of a group photo which she had.

Two days later, Sir Oliver also had a sitting,
anonymously, with the same medium and received material from the "spirit
control":

Your common-sense method of approaching
the subject in the family has been the means of helping him to come back
as he has been able to do; and had he not known what you had told him,
then it would have been far more difficult for him to come back. He is
very deliberate in what he says. He is a young man that knows what he is
saying. Do you know F W M?

O. J. L. -- Yes I do.

Because I see those three letters. Now,
after them, do you know S T; yes, I get S T, then a dot, and then P? These
are shown to me; I see them in light; your boy has shown these things to
me.

Well he says to me: "He has helped me so
much more than you think. That is F W M."

O. J. L. -- Bless him!

No, your boy laughs, he has got an ulterior
motive for it; don't think it was only for charity's sake, he has got an
ulterior motive, and thinks that you will be able by the strength of your
personality to do what you want to do now, to ride over the quibbles of
the fools, and to make the Society, the Society, he says, of some use to
the world.

About five weeks later, Lodge again sat with
Mrs. Leonard, who by this time grasped his identity. He asked Raymond,
through the control Feda, to describe further the group photograph, which
had not yet arrived. Further details were given in terms of the position
Raymond took relative to the man behind him who was leaning on his shoulder.
These details were confirmed when the picture finally arrived.

Communications from Raymond, filled with
evidential material, continued for many years through Mrs. Leonard and
also through other mediums. Lodge's entire family participated in these
sittings and all became convinced of the reality of Raymond's departed
spirit. On one occasion sittings were held simultaneously at two different
locations and Raymond successfully managed to convey information from one
group to the other. The complete account of these many sittings is recorded
in Lodge's book Raymond, published in 1916, which was written to further
the cause of spiritualism.

Raymond clearly conveys the excitement
which Lodge and his family felt at the time. However Raymond himself never
actually seems to control a medium. He either speaks through a "spirit
control" or through automatic writing or table-rapping. There was a consistency
to his personality, but not with the vividness of the Hodgson or the Pellew
controls experienced through Mrs. Piper.

Mrs. Leonard's integrity has never been
called into question. For over forty years her mediumship was the subject
of exhaustive study by members of the SPR. Throughout this time, Feda was
her only "control," although with a few sitters she would sometimes allow
other spirits to speak directly through the medium. In these cases, the
characterizations were brilliant and seemed to go much beyond mere reproduction
of mannerisms. For years, one occasional communicator, a person Mrs. Leonard
had never met in life, gave message after message to former loved ones
without ever speaking out of character or using inappropriate emotional
inferences. If one refuses to accept the survival hypothesis to explain
such cases, one must at least acknowledge extraordinary ESP capabilities
on the part of the medium.

The super-telepathy theory is strained
somewhat in dealing with the phenomena of cross-correspondences. The Faunus
message which was received by Sir Oliver Lodge and then alluded to by another
psychic is a minor example. The idea is creating a kind of jig-saw puzzle
in the messages coming through different mediums. Any individual piece,
when taken alone, seems to have no meaning. But when the separate pieces
are put together, they form a coherent whole, and provide evidence for
a constructive mind behind the entire design.

The major messages seem to have been directed
by the spirit of F. W. H. Myers who died in 1901. Records show that the
notion never occurred to him while he was alive. Other deceased members
of the SPR also seem to have originated cross-correspondence messages.
The mediums received these messages about the same time in places as distant
from each other as London, New York, and India. Often the messages were
filled with Greek and Latin allusions which were beyond the understanding
of the different mediums. In fact, the messages seemed to contain the type
of humor, style, and scholarship which was characteristic of the deceased
researchers. The messages were often so complex that the puzzles could
only be understood by classical language scholars.

The "Margery" Mediumship

A baffling cross-correspondence series
occurred in the United States, supposedly originating through "Walter,"
the deceased brother of Mina Crandon. Mrs. Crandon, the wife of a professor
of surgery at Harvard University, has been one of the most controversial
mediums of the twentieth century. Her psychokinetic manifestations were
verified by many researchers throughout the world under apparently strict
conditions. Yet at other times she was accused of fraud.

Crude "ectoplasmic" hand
exuding from navelphotographed at seance
with "Margery," in Boston, 1925

The Crandons lived in Boston; however Walter
also appeared through other mediums in New York, Niagara Falls, and Maine.
On one occasion he announced a cross-correspondence in which "Margery"
(as Mrs. Crandon was called) would make up a problem and two other mediums
would each provide half of the answer. The problem written automatically
by the medium was: "11 X 2 -- to kick a dead." The mediumistic circle in
New York was rung by telephone and told by Judge Cannon that Walter had
given a message: "2 -- no one stops." The next morning a telegram was received
from Niagara Falls announcing this fragment: "2 horse." When the fragments
are put together, one can see that the problem which Walter worked out
and communicated -- assuming there was no conspiracy to cheat -- was this:
"11 X 2 = 22. No one stops to kick a dead horse."

One might argue this case is an instance
of group telepathy as the medium obviously knew the entire puzzle. Other
evidence, however, also strengthens the case for Walter's autonomous existence.
At times he was able to speak with a "direct voice -- without using the
vocal cords of either the medium or the sitters. His voice just appeared
in the room. Furthermore, some cross-correspondences devised by Walter
were in Chinese -- a language which Margery did not know. Walter claimed
he was getting help from some Chinese spirits. Even if telepathy were at
play in the transmission of information, it is hard to explain the actual
design of the puzzles with that hypothesis.

Reincarnation

Another approach to the question of survival
focuses on reincarnation. The popular view of reincarnation is that after
a person dies, the spirit of that person is reborn in another body. This
process, of entering the womb, is vividly described in the Tibetan Book
of the Dead. The concept is much more complex, however, when considered
in the light of mystical philosophies which see one underlying reality
beyond and within all time and individuality.

A belief in reincarnation has been held
throughout the world. Lyall Watson, noted biologist and author of Supernature,
and The Living World of Animals, has commented extensively on reincarnation
in his book, The Romeo Error: A Matter of Life and Death:

No other single notion has ever
received so widespread a cultural endorsement. It could be argued that
this in itself might have kept a meaningless concept alive for a long time,
but the belief stems from so many diverse and culturally unconnected origins
that I cannot believe it has not basic biological validity.

The Manavadharmasastra or Laws of
Manu constitute a classic of Hindu juridical theory. This work, which
may perhaps be dated one or two centuries B.C., condenses in the form of
diversified maxims all of the content of dharma. One passage dealing with
the rules for ascetics -- or those seeking enlightenment -- elaborates
the Hindu concept of reincarnation:

Let him reflect on the transmigrations
of men, caused by their sinful deeds, on their falling into hell, and on
the torments in the world of Yama [hell], on the separation from their
dear ones, on their union with hated men, on their being overpowered by
age and being tormented by diseases, on the departure of the individual
soul from this body and its new birth in another womb, and on its wanderings
through ten thousand millions of existences, on the infliction of pain
on embodied spirits, which is caused by demerit, and the gain of eternal
bliss, which is caused by the attainment of their highest aim, gained through
spiritual merit.

Remembrance of former existences (pubbenivasanussati)
is considered one of the six higher spiritual powers of Buddhism. Regarding
this power, the Buddhist scripture states:

He remembers manifold former existences
(pubbenivasanussati), such as one birth, two, three, four and five births
... hundred thousand births, remembers many formations and dissolutions
of worlds: 'There I was, such name I had ... and vanishing from there I
reappeared here.' Thus he remembers, always together with the marks and
peculiarities, many a former existence.

The Jewish historian Josephus (died A.D. 101)
wrote, "All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course
of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies." Josephus
refers to reincarnation as being commonly accepted among the Jews of his
time. The Zohar (Vol. II, fol. 99, et seq.), the basic text of Jewish
Kabbalistic mysticism is also quite explicit:

All souls are subject to the trials
of transmigration; and men do not know the designs of the Most High with
regard to them; they know not how they are being at all times judged, both
before coming into this world and when they leave it. They do not know
how many transmigrations and mysterious trials they must undergo; how many
souls and spirits come to this world without returning to the palace of
the divine king.

"The souls must reenter the absolute substance
whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must develop
all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they
have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another,
a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits
them for reunion with God.

The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia also
states that reincarnaton became a "universal belief" in the mystical Jewish
hassidic tradtion. The beloved Jewish writer Sholem Asch (1880- 1957) provides
a vivid description of reincarnation in his novel, The Nazarene:

Not the powerto remember, but
its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our
existence. if the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then
these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness.
According to the Jewish view we make the transition under the overlordship
of the Angel of Forgetfulness. But it sometimes happens that the Angel
of Forgetfulness himself forgets to remove from our memories the records
of the former world; and then our senses are haunted by framentary recollections
of another life. They drift like torn clouds above the hills and valleys
of the mind, and weave themselves into the incidents of our current existence....then
the effect is exactly the same as when, listening to a concert broadcast
through the air, we suddenly hear a strange voice break in, carried from
afar on another ether-wave and charged with another melody.

The mystic and mathematician, Pythagoras,
was one of the earliest known advocates of the doctrine of reincarnation.
Pythagoras claimed that he had lived as a prophet named Hermotimus, who
was burned to death by his rivals about 200 years earlier. In one of Plato's
dialogues, Socrates indicates that teaching is not a matter of something
being placed in one person by another, but of eliciting something already
present. He was not interested in drawing out the petty things like names
and dates that we retrieve under hypnosis, but "traces of knowledge garnered
by the soul in its timeless journey."

The concept of reincarnation existed in
Christianity until it was attacked in 543 A.D. by the Byzantine emperor,
Justinian and finally condemned by the Second Council in Constantinople
in 553 A.D. Recent evidence advanced by Catholic scholars throws a new
light on the whole matter.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (under
"Councils of Constantinople") gives some information permitting the conclusion
on technical grounds, that there is no barrier to belief in reincarnation
for Catholic Christians. For example, Pope Vigilius, although he was in
Constantinople at the time, refused to attend, in protest for the way in
which the Emperor Justinian exerted absolute control over the Church patriarchy.

Catholic scholars are beginning to disclaim
that the Roman Church actually took any official part in the anathemas
against the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul, suggesting that
during the many centuries when the Church believed it had condemned reincarnation,
it was mistaken.

While reincarnation is not emphasized in
contemporary Islamic faith, the Koran (2.28) explicitly asks, "How
can you make denial of Allah, who made you live again when you died, will
make you dead again, and then alive again, unti you finally return to him?"

One of the most eloquent testimonials to
the beauty of reincarnation comes from the writings of the great Sufi poet,
Jalaluddin Rumi (died 1273) who wrote:

Like grass I have grown over and
over again. I passed out of mineral form and lived as a plant. From plant
I was lifted up to be an animal. Then I put away the animal form and took
on a human shape. Why should i fear that if I died I shall be lost? For
passing human form I shall attain the flowing locks and shining wings of
angels. And then I shall become what no mind has ever conceived. O let
me cease to exist! For non-existence only means that I shall return to
Him.

The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung,
expresses my own thoughts:

Rebirth is an affirmation that
must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial
affirmations are based on what I call archetypes....There must be psychic
events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology
to discuss -- without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical
assumptions regarding their significance.

Some evidence for reincarnation comes from
cases where individuals under hypnosis produce memories from what might
be taken as a prior lifetime. These memories come through with a vividness
of emotion and detail very much like early childhood memories. Often the
reincarnation dramas seem to explain important characteristics in the subject's
psychological makeup. This type of testimony is very interesting from a
psychodynamic point of view. However, it cannot constitute acceptable evidence
for reincarnation until it is shown that the descriptions match actual
life-histories which are unknown to the subject -- even then it could be
merely postcognition.

Hypnotic regressions to ostensible "past
lives" are fascinating psychological events that have attracted attention
in professional journals and in the popular press. A large number of case
reports have been published, but few of these cases were researched exhaustively,
few were based on extensive hypnotic interviews, and few authors reported
negative as well as positive findings.

One recently reported case developed a
methodology for research in this area: 60 hypnotic interviews were conducted
with a single subject, all relevant archives were exhausted, and negative
as well as positive data was reported. The reincarnation hypothesis was
juxtaposed with a more conventional hypothesis emphasizing normal factors
such as suggestion, role-playing, loss of inhibition, dissociation (including
cryptomnesia), and desire to please the hypnotist. A method was introduced
in which information found in public libraries and popular texts was contrasted
with information found in foreign archieves. The results of this rigorous
procedure led to the acceptance of conventional explanations for the reported.

Still another explanation for so-called
reincarnation evidence would be simple spirit possession.

Even if we were to conclude from other
evidence that reincarnation was real, we need not assume it always occurs.
Some cultures maintain the belief, for example, that one only reincarnates
if one dies prematurely by accident.

The cases which are coming under serious
scientific scrutiny are typically those in which a small child, two to
four years old, begins talking to the parents about another lifetime. Generally,
the parents will dismiss such talk as nonsense -- even in cultures where
reincarnation is believed to occur. However, the child may persist and
even insist upon visiting the community of his former residence. If the
child supplies many details the parents may initiate an inquiry. Ideally
at this stage, a scientific investigator is introduced to the scene. Careful
records are made of all the child's statements. Verification can then begin
by visiting the indicated community. If a family exists meeting the child's
descriptions of his former household, the investigator can arrange for
the two families to visit. Tests are then arranged to determine if the
child can recognize places, objects, and people. Often it seems these memories
are lost as the child grows older.

Unfortunately, most investigations do not
proceed so smoothly. Nevertheless over a thousand such cases have now been
investigated and a very suggestive body of evidence is accumulating. As
an example of an actual study, the case of Swarnlata Mishra is instructive.

On March 2, 1948, Swarnlata was born the
daughter of the district school inspector in Chhatarpur, Madya Pradesh,
India. At the age of three and a half, while on a trip with her father
passing through the town of Katni, she made a number of strange remarks
about her house in this village. The Mishra family had never lived closer
than 100 miles from this town. Later she described to friends and family
further details of a previous life. Her family name, she claimed, had been
Pathak. She also performed unusual dances and songs which she had had no
opportunity to learn.

At the age of ten Swarnlata recognized
a new family acquaintance, the wife of a college professor, as a friend
in her former lifetime. Several months later, this case was brought to
the attention of Sri H. N. Banerjee, of the Department of Parapsychology,
University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. He interviewed the Mishra family; then,
guided by Swarnlata's statements, he located the house of the Pathak family
in Katni. Banerjee found that Swarnlata's statements seemed to fit the
life history of Biya, a daughter of the Pathak family and deceased wife
of Sri Chintamini Panday. She had died in 1939.

In the summer of 1959, the Pathak family
and Biya's married relatives visited the Mishra family in Chhatarpur. Swarnlata
was able to recognize and identify them. She refused to identify strangers
who had been brought along to confuse her. Later Swarnlata was taken to
Katni and the neighboring towns. There she recognized additional peo`&#0;e
and places, commenting on changes which had been made since Biya's death.
Unfortunately Sri Banerjee was not present during these reunions.

It was not until the summer of 1961 that
Dr. Ian Stevenson, an eminent psychiatrist and psychical researcher from
the University of Virginia, visited the two families and attempted to verify
the authenticity of the case.

Stevenson determined that of 49 statements
made by Swarnlata only two were found to be incorrect. She accurately described
the details of Biya's house and neighborhood as they were before 1939.
She described the details of Biya's disease and death as well as the doctor
who treated her. She was able to recall intimate incidents known only to
a few individuals. For example, she knew Sri Ciantimini Pandey had taken
1200 ruples from a box in which Biya had kept money. He admitted this,
when questioned, and stated no one but Biya could have known of the incident.
She accurately identified former friends, relatives, and servants in spite
of the efforts of the witnesses to deny her statements or mislead her.
Most of the recognitions were given in a way which obliged Swarnlata to
provide a name or state a relationship. It was not a case of asking, "Am
I your son?" but rather, "Tell me who I am."

Perhaps because of her family's tolerance,
Swarnlata's impressions of Biya's life have not faded. In fact, Swarnlata
continues to visit Biya's brothers and children and shows great affection
for them. Remarkably she continues to act as an older sister to the Pathak
brother--men forty years older than her. Furthermore, the Pathak family
was rather westernized and did not believe in reincarnation before their
encounter with Swarnlata.

Swarnlata also talked about another intermediate
life as a child named Kamlesh in Sylket, Bengal, where she died at the
age of nine. While this claim has not been verified in detail, many of
her statements were found to correlate with the local geography. Her songs
and dances were also verified as Bengali, although she had lived all her
life only among Hindi speaking people.

If one rules out the possibility of fraud
in such cases -- and there are many which are as evidential as this one--one
might assume a child like Swarnlata was recalling the memories of stories
which she had overheard during her very early childhood or infancy. The
other explanation -- as with mediumship -- involves ESP along with a remarkable
skill for impersonation.

Xenoglossy

Perhaps the most extraordinary cases which
challenge the super-ESP hypothesis are those which involve xenoglossy or
the ability to speak a language one has never learned. The Bengali songs
and dances which Swarnlata was able to recite offer a minor example of
xenoglossy. Other cases are far more intriguing.

Dr. Ian Stevenson documents the case of
a Russian-Jewish woman living in Philadelphia who, under hypnosis, claimed
to be a Swedish peasant named Jensen Jacoby. Furthermore, she was able
to carry on rather involved conversations in this state using a mixture
of Swedish and Norwegian with proper grammar and inflectional intonations.
Speaking in a gruff male voice, she vividly portrayed the personality of
the illiterate peasant and was also able to accurately identify objects
borrowed from the American Swedish historical museum in Philadelphia. Most
of these hypnotic sessions were taperecorded.

Stevenson spent over six years researching
this case, interviewing witnesses and family members in order to determine
if there was any possibility the subject had been exposed to the Swedish
language at any time in her life. The case was not merely a question of
reciting memorized or remembered passages -- but rather one of carrying
on an active dialogue. After extensive and thorough research, Stevenson
felt that there was no period in the subject's life when she would have
been able to acquire the languages spoken in trance.

The lady and her husband, the medical doctor
who hypnotized her, were both subjected to a battery of personality, language,
aptitude, and lie detector tests. The indications from these tests further
added to the authenticity of the case. Stevenson feels that while ESP might
account for the informational aspects of a foreign language, it does not
necessarily explain the skill of using the language conversationally in
a meaningful way. Thus the case strongly points toward the survival hypothesis
-- even though the historical existence of the Swedish peasant has not
been fully documented.

It is impossible to base an airtight argument
for survival after death upon cultural traditions, apparitions, near death
experience, mediumship, possession, cross-correspondences, reincarnation,
or xenoglossy -- either individually or in combination. Nevertheless as
one investigates the extraordinary depths of the human personality which
are illustrated in the range of well-documented survival material, it does
become apparent that events and processes do occur which seem to challenge
all of our conceptions.

References

. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book
of the Dead. New York: Dover, 1967, pp. lviii-lxx. A classic.

. E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris: the Egyptian
Religion of Resurrection. New Hyde Park, New York: University Books,
1961. First published in 1911.

. Sir William Crookes, "Notes of an Inquiry
into the Phenomena called Spiritual," in R. G. Medhurst (ed.), Crookes
and the Spirit World. New York: Taplinger, 1972. This volume contains
descriptions of Crookes' experiments as well as his replies to his critics.

. Pedro McGregor, The Moon and Two Mountains.
London: Souvenir Press, 1966. A first-hand account of spiritualism in Brazil.

. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, I, 1882, p. 34.

. F. W. H. Myers, The Human Personality
and Its Survival of Bodily Death. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1954, p. xxix. Originally published in 1903, this book is possibly the
greatest classic of psychical research.

. Gauld, op. cit., p. 253. Gauld here is
quoting William James from The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, 1886.

. Nandor Fodor, Encyclopedia of Psychic
Science, 170.

. G. N. M. Tyrrell, Science and Psychical
Phenomena. New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1961, pp. 175-179.
The actual quote is from William James in Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research, 28, pp. 117-121.